Fantasy NPC generator with a seed
Your data
The seed is the batch. Write the number down and the same people come back at the table next week, which matters more here than it looks: an innkeeper your players liked is worth keeping, and one more click would otherwise lose them.
Nobody in the same batch repeats. The draw remembers the combinations it has already used and tries again, so asking for six people for a tavern never hands you the same blacksmith twice.
Everything here is generic fantasy on purpose. There are no names, houses or places from anyone else's work, so whatever you build on top of it stays yours.
Your people
| People drawn in this batch | — |
| Different people these tables can build | — |
| How many you can expect to draw before the first repeat | — |
That second number is much smaller than the first, and the gap is not a flaw in this page. Repeats do not wait until you have seen everything: they start showing up around the square root of the total, because every new draw can collide with every draw before it. It is the same arithmetic that puts two shared birthdays in a room of fifty people.
A generator that advertises millions of combinations and stays quiet about this is telling you half the truth. Knowing the real figure is what lets you decide when to start writing people by hand instead.
What comes out is a starting point, not a character. The secret and the want are there to be contradicted: the most useful thing you can do with one of these is decide why the two do not fit together, and let the players find out.
How many people can it make before repeating?
The tables build 576,000 different people, but that is not the number that matters. You should expect the first repeat after roughly 950 draws, not after the 576,000th.
Repeats do not wait until you have seen everything. They start appearing around the square root of the total, because each new draw can collide with every draw before it. Measured over two thousand runs, the first repeat came at 960 on average against the 951 the formula predicts.
| What people assume | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Repeats near 576,000 | repeats near 950 |
| Millions of combinations | true, and beside the point |
What is the seed for?
The seed is the batch. Write the number down and the same people come back next week, which matters more than it sounds: an innkeeper your players took to is worth keeping, and one more click would otherwise lose them for good.
It also travels. Sending someone a number is enough for them to see exactly the same people, with no file and no link to keep alive.
Can the same person show up twice in one batch?
No. The draw remembers the combinations it has already used inside a batch and tries again, so asking for six people for a tavern never hands you the same blacksmith twice.
Across batches it can happen, and the figure above tells you roughly when to expect it.
Are these ready to use as characters?
They are a starting point, not a character. What makes one of these worth playing is usually the contradiction: the secret and the want are drawn independently, so quite often they do not sit comfortably together.
Deciding why they do not fit is the part worth doing by hand, and it is where the person stops being a row of tables and becomes someone your players remember.
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